This following post is the first in, what we hope, will be a lively discussion on the issues surrounding biomass in our neighborhoods. As we grapple with the issues of meeting the growing demand for energy and our search for reasonably clean and environmentally sound options open discussion and exploration of the options will be critical. Please leave a comment or send me (sboyd@williams.edu) an opinion piece to post on either side of the issue.
By Guest Blogger: Jack Saul ’13
As Thursday Night Group has recently brought to the campus’ attention, Beaver Wood Energy has proposed the construction of a wood-burning biomass facility at the former Green Mountain Race Track on Route 7 in Pownal. Naturally, this proposition that has provoked heated debate among Bennington County and Williamstown residents.
The future biomass plant will use waste wood from the surrounding area to generate 30 mW of baseload electricity, enough to supply 30,000 homes with power for an hour, and 110,000 tons of wood pellets annually for residential and commercial use. Wood unusable for pellets will travel to the biomass burner, from which residual heat helps dry wood pellets, and the remaining ash product goes to local farmers for utilization as fertilizer. This innovative concept of integration, incomparable to any systems in currently place in existing facilities, increases efficiency and minimizes emissions to make the project potentially the cleanest biomass project this country has ever seen.
The principal concerns of the opponents of the plant have been the quality and availability of water, increased noise and traffic, the health impacts of emitted particulates, carbon emissions, and the sustainability of related forest management practices.
Water from the adjacent Hoosic River, a steady source free of suspended industrial pollutants, harmful PCBs or Cadmium, will serve as the primary coolant for the plant. The facility will discharge remaining water back to the river only after cooling it and straining out concentrated minerals in a leach field. An existing well beneath the track, also free of similar pollutants, clean enough for drinking water, and capable of producing 500 gallons per minute, will supplement the river 20% of the time. The vaporization of water from both of these sources is clearly safe, and the average pumping rate of 330 gallons per minute will not deplete surrounding aquifers.
The facility’s design meets noise requirements set by the Public Service Board and will even fall below the existing sound pressure averages at surrounding residences. Unfortunately, traffic on Route 7 will indeed increase by about 95 trucks a day, but the 5,000 cars a day tolerated by the community while the racetrack was still open clearly dwarf this figure. However inconvenient the increased traffic, it is simply a natural effect of any form of development.
Citizens of the surrounding area, including Williamstown, have also expressed legitimate concerns regarding the respiratory health effects of emissions from biomass. Again, the Pownal plant will be one of the cleanest in the country (the other perhaps being the plant’s future counterpart also built by Beaver Wood Energy in Fair Haven, VT). Emissions will fall below standards set by the EPA in the Clean Air Act as well as additional controls enforced by Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation, some of the most rigorous in the country. Of course, the plant, upon its construction, will be subject to even further inspection and accountability. Fuel for the facility consists entirely of untreated wood waste. Although at recent meetings some opponents have failed to make this distinction, the fuel includes absolutely no construction waste, which can contain hazardous material.
Twenty-five percent of wood tonnage harvested in New York and New England already goes to use as firewood and wood chips. The inefficient combustion of wood in fireplaces and woodstoves throughout the Northeast is clearly evidenced by black plumes billowing unfiltered from brick chimneys and the classic tinge of smoke in the crisp winter air, a significant contrast to the Pownal plant’s smoke and odor made negligible to non-existent by particulate control devices.
Ironically, the practice of home wood burning, dating back to pre-history, goes largely unopposed, but a biomass plant or home pellet stove using fuel from a plant could in fact make much better use of the same fuel, producing more energy or useful heat per unit of wood combusted and hundreds of times less harmful emissions and particulates by EPA estimates.
Even if opponents refuse to accept the standards put in place by our government and lawfully met by Beaver Wood, even if they do not acknowledge the plant as an ideal solution to energy problems, they must accept potential negative side effects from biomass as tradeoffs with greater evils in the context of a broader reality.
The 30 megawatts of power that disputed biomass may produce would mean 30 less megawatts of power that coal, a source of energy with even less questionable environmental damage, would otherwise produce. The efficiency of the future Pownal plant, confidently placed at around 30% but perhaps even as high as 45%, will rival the typical 33% figure for coal- and oil-fired plants.
Challengers of the Pownal plant frequently cite the Manomet Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study or rather the “wood worse than coal” oversimplification of the report by the Boston Globe. The president of the Manomet Center admits that press coverage has inaccurately interpreted the findings of the study which intended to show the complexity of the matter and prompt a thorough discussion. He has also insisted that conclusions regarding wood biomass’ carbon neutrality and relation to fossil fuels depend on the circumstances of individual cases, namely the lifecycle of the biomass used, technology of the biomass plant and fossil fuel facilities it replaces, and forest management practices. In these categories, the proposed Pownal plant fares quite well. The study does not analyze the impacts of non-greenhouse gas pollutants and may not be directly applicable to the Pownal plant as it focuses on the industry and forest of Massachusetts, not Vermont.
While the Manomet report does provide the compelling finding that wood biomass generally emits more GHGs than fossil fuels per unit of energy produced, accelerated sequestration of the remaining trees that gain additional space and the re-growth of the harvested trees offset some the emitted carbon over time, reducing net impact on the carbon cycle. The figure for carbon emissions directly from the facility can be misleading as it does not take into account this carbon removal through the sound management of stagnant forest. The combustion of fossil fuels introduces to the atmosphere carbon previously absent from the biological carbon cycle for millions of years and does not offer any method of sequestration. Wood-based biomass may not be purely carbon neutral under all circumstances, but fossil fuels are without a doubt 100% carbon additive under all circumstances.
However wood biomass compares to coal in terms of carbon emissions, the auxiliary costs of acquiring and burning coal may very well outweigh those of wood biomass. The additional consequences of coal seem somewhat needless to list but of course include acid rain and mine drainage, heavy metal and radioactive waste products, and mountaintop removal. Last week saw the rescue of 33 Chilean miners who had spent over two months trapped underground after a shaft collapsed. Even without consideration of these factors, the comparison of coal and biomass is simply a question of non-renewable or renewable on a human time scale. The production of coal through the anaerobic decomposition of organic matter takes thousands of years. The growth of trees to a usable volume through photosynthesis takes no more than a few decades, sometimes even less.
The transportation of wood will also emit much less carbon than the shipment of coal from elsewhere. Trucks will transport the wood to the plant only from within a 50-mile radius of it. Keep in mind that “locavores”, consumers concerned with the support of local economy and the limited transportation of food, typically maintain a standard of food grown within a 100-mile radius of where they purchase it. The northeast clearly has an abundance of wood and no local source of coal. In economic terms, we have a comparative advantage for the production of energy with wood.
Wood pellets produced at the plant will annually displace about 13 million gallons of heating oil, another non-renewable resource already used disproportionately in the northeast. Replacing heating oil with biomass pellets will sever connections to oil spills such as Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico this summer and the uncertain market for fossil fuels imported from unstable foreign countries, all without significantly compromising energy efficiency. In a home boiler or on a commercial scale, biomass produces heat at 70-80% efficiency, a rate comparable to that of fossil fuels.
While solar and wind power projects are clearly vital components of any plan to eliminate reliance on fossil fuels, even biomass opponents acknowledge that these two sources offer only intermittent power that simply cannot match the energy output of coal (or nuclear, an important consideration in the event of Vermont Yankee’s shut down). Alternatively, biomass provides baseload power, has the capacity to run constantly, and will use existing power lines. As demonstrated by the solar facility scheduled for the same energy park as the Beaver Wood plant in Pownal, biomass does not eliminate the possibility for other renewables and can be part of a multi-pronged approach to fulfilling our energy needs without coal.
The division over the question of biomass can perhaps be attributed partly to a simple matter of differences in perspective. As opposed to those with first-hand experience in the wood-based economy, people whose primary time spent in the woods takes place in no-cut forests such as national parks or Berkshire mountain reservations are much less likely to observe the utility of the forest beyond recreation and jump to conclusions regarding timber harvesting.
Much of the opposition to the biomass plant on environmental grounds is based on a general negative emotional response to tree cutting, not based in fact. The suggestion that harvesting would turn the Green Mountain State into the Brown Mountain State is unfounded, and terms such as “forest incineration” are intended simply to provoke hysteria. The intricate issue of harvesting wood to produce heat and electricity transcends bumper sticker slogans.
The wood brought to the Pownal plant consists exclusively of waste and low-quality wood from existing logging operations within a 50-mile radius of Pownal. Biomass lends worth to and prevents the waste of the tops, branches, and residual mill waste from trees already harvested for other purposes as well as dead, diseased, broken, crooked or otherwise undesirable trees without better use.
The additional income from this low-grade wood supports the landowners, foresters, and loggers whose livelihood depends on the continued existence and productivity of the forest. If the forest industry ceases to profit from wood products, the economic incentive to sell forested land for conversion to housing or other development will likely outweigh that of keeping it in a forested state. Increased payment for low-quality wood makes its removal more viable, and the elimination of these unwanted trees makes room for others with more value potential as sawlogs. The growth of a tree’s diameter, an aspect of its worth, depends almost exclusively on how much sunlight reaches its crown, a factor determined by forest stocking levels. This increased value of wood products in both the creation of a market for unwanted and waste wood and the improved quality of future sawlogs prevents forest landowners from giving in to the temptation of development, the worst possible outcome for any portion of woodlands.
Even in the extreme case of clear-cuts (which will not take place for the purpose of providing the Pownal plant with wood), the resilient Northeastern forest can recover. The history of New England since the mid-nineteenth century, in which agriculture cleared almost all of the region’s land of forest, demonstrates this point. On the other hand, the construction of a shopping mall or housing complex obviously prevents forest succession indefinitely.
Vermont forests are already sustainably managed and can further provide more than enough wood to support the Pownal plant. Vermont has a superior record of private woodlot management to Massachusetts, and all harvesting for the state’s biomass plants must meet wildlife standards and run under thorough state-approved sustainable forest management plans that require explicit consent for heavy cuts over 40 acres. Of the 3.2 million acres of timber within the 50-mile radius around the plant, 70% is privately owned commercial forestland. Of the 2.4 million tons of annual growth, 552,000 tons of sawlogs and 1.2 million tons of pulp and firewood are removed already each year, leaving a 600,000-ton annual surplus of growth from which the Beaver Wood plant would require 330,000 tons. Without a surplus of wood available at a low price for at least 20 years, the facility would not have been proposed; the possibility of sustainably providing wood for multiple plants in the area exists, especially if wood tonnage previously allocated to pulp and firewood purposes goes to biomass.
This wood biomass, a local source of renewable energy, will also be a local source of general economic well-being, keeping money in the closed-loop of a rural area. Ever since the racetrack closed in 1992, Pownal has tried to create jobs as all the while hundreds of acres of prime property sit idle and the old grandstand decays. The Pownal plant will bring $31.5 million to the town in payroll and other expenses. With priority given to Vermont natives and Pownal locals, the facility will require 50 full-time workers with salaries between $30,000 and $100,000 a year, 140 more jobs elsewhere in support industries, plus hundreds of temporary jobs in construction and further income to loggers and forestland owners. The venture would contribute $2.7 million in taxes to the state during construction and $2.3 million more in operation. $525,000 in property taxes would represent about 45% of the town’s property tax, a savings of several hundred dollars per household.
The project represents a total cost of $250 million to Beaver Wood, $2 million of which has already gone into studying the site. Environmental and financial consultants’ reputations and investors’ money stand on the line. The proposal would not have come so far without substantial review resulting in these individuals’ confidence that the facility would not stop operating due to permit violations or lack of wood or cooling water.
While Thursday Night Group touts a respected former ENVI professor now on the IPCCC who opposes the plant, they neglect to mention significant local supporters of the expanded use of biomass that include the Sierra Club, Vermont Natural Resource Council, the Forest Council, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. TNG should also note that Middlebury College, a fellow leader in campus sustainability headed by none other than Bill McKibben, generates a fifth of its electricity and heat through a biomass cogeneration facility.
Clearly, the proponents of this idea have not made themselves as known as possible. With such a vocal and misled opposition, informed approval must not lie dormant and passive. Just as TNG has done, I encourage the reader to attend and participate in meetings regarding the plant and to contact representatives, selectman, and the neutral Williams administration. The mere presentation of plans for the project does not guarantee future operation, and public opinion can make all the difference.